A10 Acquires Appcito for Application Delivery Push

A10 Networks today announced that it is acquiring privately-held technology vendor Appcito. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed at this time. Appcito had raised $15.1 million in venture capital since the company was founded in 2013.

"Everyone wants to be more agile and the adoption of cloud and microservices are steps in that direction," Kamal Anand, CEO and Co-founder of Appcito, told Enterprise Networking Planet. "The name 'cito' in Latin literally means fast and agile and that underlies what we do."

Appcito had originally named its core product platform CAFE, the Cloud Application Front End (CAFE) but has since rebranded to the Application Delivery System.

"Since we were becoming more embedded in front of containers and micro-services, we changed the name from CAFE," Anand said.

The Application Delivery System provides traffic management that can be tied into the DevOps process, including Continuous Integration and Continuous Development (CI/CD). It also does application level security while providing visibility into traffic. As part of A10, Kamal expects to go through another branding exercise, which could potentially result in some new naming as well.

Kamal emphasize that Appcito's technology is not the same as Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), but rather is a mirror image.

"We typically sit in front of applications and server to increase availability, performance and security," Kamal said. "CASB in contrast sits at the edge of an enterprise network."

With CASB, an enterprise user that is attempting to access a cloud service gets the benefit of the enterprise security policy. Kamal noted that Appcito and CASB technology are both similar in that they are both proxy-based approaches.

"Now as part of A10, we might look at the CASB market and capabilities in the future," Kamal said. "A10 has a focus on cloud and is now creating a new business unit for cloud with the acquisition of Appcito as a starting point."

From an integration point with A10's existing business, Kamal noted that the A10 Thunder Application Delivery Controller is available as both hardware and software appliances that can work Appcito's technology.

"From a management, orchestration and analytics perspective, the goal is to have one integrated portfolio," Kamal said. "There will be some use-cases where container based services are a better fit for a lightweight ADC and there be cases for traditional applications that are fit just for the Thunder ADC that already exists."

Kamal added that the overall plan is to provide additional value to A10's existing customer, while also providing new capabilities to address areas where A10 hasn't previously had customers.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.